Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 05.04.06

[David Shove (shove001]

            P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R     05.04.06

1. Big$/corruptGovt    5.04 2:30pm
2. Ambazonia/film      5.04 8pm

3. Factory animals     5.05 9am
4. Ffunch lunch        5.05 11:30am
5. Mini-Guantanamo     5.05 12noon
6. Counter recruit     5.05 12noon
7. MidEast policy      5.05 1:30pm/5.06 9:30am
8. Palestine vigil     5.05 4:15pm
9. Dave Berger/950AM   5.05 5:15pm
10. Maquilladoras/film 5.05 6pm
11. N-V/Christianity   5.05 7pm
12. Racial justice     5.05 7pm

13. Vijay Prashad  - The lobby
14. Derrick Jensen - Beyond hope

--------1 of 14--------

Date: Wed, 03 May 2006 09:32:08 -0400
From: erin [at] mnwomen.org
Subject: Big$/corruptGovt 5.04 2:30pm

Thursday, May 4: Jobs NOW Coalition Annual Meeting with special guest
speaker David Sirota, author of "Hostile Takeover: How Big Money &
Corruption Conquered our Government --and How We Take It Back.

2:30-6pm. Lakes and Plains Regional Council of Carpenters and Joiners,
Auditorium Hall, 700 Olive Street, St. Paul. jncinfo [at] jobsnowcoalition.org


--------2 of 14--------

Date: 3 May 2006 17:51:05 -0000
From: Arise! Bookstore Announcements <arise [at] arisebookstore.org>
Subject: Ambazonia/film 5.04 8pm

Thursday May 4, 8 PM
Film Screening
Join us for a screening of a brand new documentary, Standing with the
Students of Ambazonia, which documents the student uprising in southern
Cameroon (Ambazonia) a year ago this month. The filmmaker, who snuck back
into the country (from which he was exiled) to capture this event, will
discuss the film as well.


--------3 of 14--------

From: Jason Ketola <jason [at] ca4a.org>
Subject: Factory animals 5.05 9am

Yard Sale to Help Factory Farmed Animals!

Help animals while shopping! Come to Compassionate Action for Animals's
HUGE Yard Sale on Friday, May 5, and Saturday, May 6 in Uptown.

We've received donations from over 35 people, so we'll have virtually
anything you're looking for. Mark your calendars and make sure you stop by
to buy some cool stuff, all at a great price! If you would be willing to
help out on Friday or Saturday, please email us at info [at] ExploreVeg.org
<mailto:info [at] exploreveg.org>.

9am-3pm, both Friday, May 5, and Saturday, May 6
2641 Dupont Ave S. in Uptown
All the funds raised will support our work on behalf of farm animals!


--------4 of 14--------

From: David Shove <shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu>
Subject: Ffunch lunch 5.05 11:30am

Meet the FFUNCH BUNCH!
11:30am-1pm
First Friday Lunch (FFUNCH) for Greens/progressives.

Informal political talk and hanging out.

Day By Day Cafe 477 W 7th Av St Paul.
Meet in the private room (holds 12+).

Day By Day has soups, salads, sandwiches, and dangerous apple pie; is
close to downtown St Paul & on major bus lines


--------5 of 14--------

From: cpoint [at] umn.edu
Subject: Mini-Guantanamo 5.05 12noon

Crisis Point: Theatre of Danger and Opportunity at the University of
Minnesota will be sponsoring a mini-Guantanamo camp in downtown
Minneapolis on Peavey Plaza continuously from noon on Friday, May 5th
through Midnight Saturday/Sunday May 6th/7th. We need a large number of
volunteers/performers to serve as guards throughout the day and a half
period. We are currently scheduling people in 2, 3 or 4 hour increments.

We also need help with last minute media work and contacting to make sure
we get media coverage for the event.

To get involved, please contact Crisis Point Theatre at cpoint [at] umn.edu.
Laura Winton Crisis Point


--------6 of 14--------

From: sarah standefer <scsrn [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Counter recruit 5.05 12noon

Counter Recruitment Demonstration
 Our Children Are Not Cannon Fodder

Fridays   NOON-1
Recruiting Office at the U of M
At Washington and Oak St.  next to Chipolte
for info call Barb Mishler 612-871-7871


--------7 of 14--------

From: humanrts [at] umn.edu
Subject: MidEast policy 5.05 1:30pm/5.06 9:30am

May 5 - Life and Politics in the Middle East: "Perspectives on American
Foreign Policy".  1:30-4pm (Friday); 9:30am-4pm (Saturday).

Symposium on Life and Politics in the Middle East with "Perspectives on
American Foreign Policy" with Ray Hinnebusch (St Andrews U in Ireland)
talking about Hegemon: the U.S. and Iraq, then John Collins (St. Lawrence
U in NY) talking about Notes from the Global Palestine.

Saturday, 5/6, the Symposium Life and Politics in the Middle East
continues from 9:30am to 12noon, "Impact of Globalization on Women" with
Frances Hasso (Oberlin) talking about the Economies of Desire and Nilufar
Ashtari (Brussels) talking about Martyrs and Angels in Iran's Sacred
Defense Cinema.

Noon to 1:30 pm, Nancy Parlin (FOR) leans a discussion on Iran.  1:30 to 4
pm, Images of Palestinians with Jesse Benjamin (St. Cloud State) talking
about Bedouin Historiography in Israel and Rochelle Davis (Georgetown U)
talking about Use of Folklore in the Village Memorial Books.

FFI: www.hamline.edu/critique
Location: University Conference Center, Hamine U, 1536 Hewitt Ave,
St.


--------8 of 14--------

From: peace 2u <tkanous [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Palestine vigil 5.05 4:15pm

Every Friday
Vigil to End the Occupation of Palestine

4:15-5:15pm
Summit & Snelling, St. Paul

There are now millions of Palestinians who are refugees due to Israel's
refusal to recognize their right under international law to return to
their own homes since 1948.


--------9 of 14--------

Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 20:58:44 -0500
From: "Berger, Dave" <dberger [at] inverhills.mnscu.edu>
Subject: Dave Berger/950AM 5.05 5:15pm

Dave Berger, Green Party Candidate for Minnesota State Auditor, will be
interviewed on Air America AM950 this Friday, May 5, 2006 at 5:15pm.

The topic will be universal single payer health care and the recent
protest many progressives attended on May 2, 2006 at the United Health
Group stockholders meeting protesting CEO Bill Mcguire's obscene
compensation package of $2 Billion.


--------10 of 14-------

From: humanrts [at] umn.edu
Subject: Maquilladoras/film 5.05 6pm

May 5 - Film: "Maquillapolis".  6pm
Cost: Free.
Free film "Maquillapolis," about maquilladoras in Tijuana.
FFI: www.americas.org
Location: Resource Center of the Americas, 3019 Minnehaha, Mpls.


--------11 of 14--------

From: wamm <wamm [at] mtn.org>
Subject: N-V/Christianity 5.05 7pm

Nonviolence: Christianity's Greatest Failure and Its Best Hope: Al Bostleman

Friday, May 5, 7-9pm. Plymouth Presbyterian Church, 3755 Dunkirk Lane
North, Plymouth.

Speaker, Al Bostleman is a clinical social worker and a combat-trained
infantry veteran and the son of a WWII military chaplain. Al will tell his
own history, coming from a strong Christian training, unquestioningly
serving in the military and seeing this as part of his Christian religious
beliefs.


--------12 of 14--------

From: wamm <wamm [at] mtn.org>
Subject: Racial justice 5.05 7pm

Action for Racial Justice: Gary Delgado
Friday, May 5, 7pm. First Unitarian Society, 900 Mount Curve, Minneapolis.

Gary Delgado, Ph. D., the Executive Director and founder of the Applied
Research Center in Oakland, California, is a nationally recognized
researcher, lecturer and activist on issues of race and social justice. He
has worked extensively in both the organizing and the academic
communities. His analytical work includes over 30 articles and studies on
social change practice. Gary was one of the initial organizers of ACORN, a
lead organizer with the National Welfare Rights Organization, and
cofounder and director of the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO). In
1988, he received the prestigious Bannerman Fellowship for activists of
color in its first year. He was recognized as a Hellraiser by "Mother
Jones" magazine in 1996, and was profiled as a one of 61 Visionaries by
"Utne Reader." FFI: Call 612-377-6608 or visit
<www.firstunitariansociety.org>.


--------13 of 14--------

The Lobby
By Vijay Prashad
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-05/04prashad.cfm
ZNet Commentary
May 04, 2006

Talk about political correctness. You can't mention Israel's Little Power
ambitions and its ingenious reach into the halls of the US establishment
without getting whacked. All of us who have an opinion about the role of
Israel in Washington, and of groups like WINEP on Israeli politics, don't
all speak with one voice. If you read the Counterpunch collection (The
Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair) alongside Chomsky's writings on the Middle East, the range of
opinion will become clear.

Indeed, Jeffrey Blankfort, in the Counterpunch collection, takes on
Chomsky directly for an apparent underestimation of Israeli influence.
There is no singular line, although with differences in emphases, there is
agreement that not only does the intransigent Right in Washington model
itself after Israel's forward policy, but it is also deeply influenced by
various Zionist organizations that make it their business to push and prod
Washington to line up with the Israeli state's Middle East policy.

That many American Jews disavow these organizations (AIPAC and WINEP) is
clear to many of the writers who make this point. One of the more toxic
Zionists is Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, who
once said, "Shamir, Sharon, Bibi - whatever these guys want is pretty much
fine by me." He's a Midwestern Christian. For me, there is a fundamental
distinction between calling this power bloc an "Israeli lobby" or a
"Zionist lobby" and a "Jewish lobby." The two former designations are more
accurate, and far less prone to misrepresentation. Although with the
forces that dismiss all criticism of Israel as the delusions of an
anti-Semite would hardly listen carefully for these crucial differences.

Nothing the Israeli Lobby does is unusual. It operates in the way of the
hundreds of other lobbies that operate in and around Washington. The two
most recently being smacked around for their article on the lobby
(establishment figures John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt) go as far as to
point out that what the Israeli Lobby does is vintage American politics.
"This is a classic case of interest group politics," Mearsheimer told The
New York Times. "It's as American as apple pie" (April 12, 2006). Some
lobbies are more successful because their agenda is not averse to those of
the US elite.

What Mearsheimer and Walt, as well as many others before them, suggest is
that the demands of the Israeli Lobby have perverted the realistic foreign
policy objectives of the US. They can only believe that because they have
a neutral conception of US interests, as if the US government formulates
its policies based on the interest of its population. In fact, to my mind,
the US government develops it approach to the world not with its
population in mind, but with the interests of the entrenched global
hierarchy at heart.

For example, while the US government apparently objects to international
governance in principle, it is quite happy to push international treaties
that protect the intellectual property rights of those who hold the means
of conception. This elite also has a very well developed sense of its need
to command the basic resources of capitalism (including energy resources).
For that reason, it is willing to knit itself to the forward policy of
Zionism, as well as the forward policy of the Venezuelan aristocracy, the
Colombian drug-land lords and the Burmese Junta (to name a few allies of
the duopoly). Extravagances of the gun are of value when they ensure that
the Law of Value is untroubled.

Discussion of the Israeli Lobby is crucial, as long as it does not eclipse
two other central lobbies: the American Lobby and the Ares Lobby. The
American Lobby is not so well known perhaps because it is ubiquitous. When
George W. Bush came to India last month, for instance, the American Lobby
was in full effect:

1) Certain political parties (the BJP, for instance, as well as sections
of the Congress) have knit their global role to US preeminence.

2) Entire industries (not just Business Process Outsourcing, but also
research and development and some export manufacturing) salivate before
the US dollar.

3) A highly educated class (tens of millions of people) that is eager for
upward mobility. As the Indian psychologist Sudhir Kakar puts it, "This
class somehow has the ability to transmute a flame into a blaze.' The
biographer of this class, Pavan K. Varma, writes that although it "thinks
out of the box" and is "a hugely entrepreneurial class," it "may be bent
on cloning itself on the West." The attachment of this class to the graded
inequality of the global capitalist system is driven by its own
aspirations to rise up the ladder.

These interests coalesce with much more powerful forces: the ruling class
in places such as India, Brazil and South Africa, the organized might of
the G-7, the various international financial conglomerates. This class has
its annual meeting at Davos. Their mouthpiece is Thomas Friedman. We have
plenty of research of this or that element of the American Lobby, but we
don't often give it its rightful name.

The other Lobby also slides under the radar: the Ares Lobby. As the fracas
over the Israeli Lobby broke out, I was reading Jeffrey St. Clair's new
book, Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the
War on Terror (Common Courage, 2005). St. Clair marshals an enormous
amount of detail that justifies President Eisenhower's premonitions about
the Military Industrial Complex. For the Ares Lobby, 911 has been a real
godsend. It enabled a massive expansion of the US military spending, and
justified the kind of reckless expenditure only the Pentagon is allowed to
get away with in this time of fiscal tightness.

There's Lockheed (daily feed from the federal treasury = $65 million). It
has its fists in almost all the major arms deals, and it even makes
armaments that are utterly useless in the current political environment
(the F-22 Raptor, for instance, designed to battle the Soviet landmass is
of no value against al-Qaeda, nor, at $300 million per plane, would it be
worthwhile in a conflict against the relatively under-armed Chinese air
force - even ace hawk Robert Kaplan conceded that the Chinese "navy and
air force will not be able to match ours for some decades," if ever).

In St. Clair's Believe It Or Not we get the litany of corporate crimes
from such familiar villains as Halliburton, Bechtel, Boeing, Pratt and
Whitney, and the Carlyle Group; we also get treated to details of
strategically dubious armaments (the F-22 Raptor, the A-10 Warthog, the
Patriot Missile, Star Wars, et. seq.). The business of the arms merchants,
one Bechtel shill says, "is a lumpy business. Some projects come through
that are a billion, some are a mere $200 million." As St. Clair comments,
"Note the sly emphasis on 'mere.'" Indeed.

Most of this is well known, or else has been reasonably documented by
non-profit research foundations such as the Center for Public Integrity,
Project on Government Oversight or CorpWatch. But few write with St.
Clair's verve, and with his wit. That's a bonus.

What is less attended to in the public mind, but is well documented by St.
Clair, is the Ares Lobby: the ensemble of lobbyists, political
representatives and their allies assembled by the arms industry to
facilitate its interests. There is little embarrassment about this in
Washington because it is so banal: politicians take money from arms
dealers and then push their weapons systems; when the politicians retire,
they work for the arms industry. This is routine, and only occasionally
does someone get into trouble for failing to cover their hypocrisy by
sufficient technicalities.

St. Clair's book begins with Duke Cunningham who represented San Diego,
but who worked for MZM Incorporated. It was only after eight terms of
mendacity that Cunningham fell on the government's proffered sword (a
loyalist for Pentagon gourmandize, Cunningham had got too flashy with
MZM's gifts).

St. Clair's former colleague at Counterpunch and current LA Times
reporter, Ken Silverstein, wrote in 1998, "When you consider the enormous
benefits bestowed on Corporate America by the White House and Congress,
the big sums companies spend to win favors are revealed as chump change."
Lockheed paid $5 to lobby Congress in 1996, but won approval for a $15
billion government fund to underwrite arms sales overseas. The rate of
return is staggering.

The Lobby pervades every aspect of Washington - it is not its money that
buys its favors. That would be too easy (and it is what exercises
liberals). The Lobby is not the lobbyists, but it includes them and
encompasses the political class and the arms merchants as well. They are
the Lobby. In that sense, we are today governed by the Merchants of Death.


-------14 of 14--------

BEYOND HOPE
by Derrick Jensen
ORION MAGAZINE <ay 2006
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/06-3om/Jensen.html

THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are,
We're fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately,
using whatever tools they have - or rather whatever legal tools they have,
which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use,
which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective - to try to
protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of
poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of
plants or animals. Sometimes they're reduced to trying to protect just one
tree.

Here's how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his
reasons for doing the work: "As things become increasingly chaotic, I want
to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in
twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If
they're gone in twenty, they'll be gone forever."

But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are
insufficient. We're losing badly, on every front. Those in power are
hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don't care.

Frankly, I don't have much hope. But I think that's a good thing. Hope is
what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas
and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may
inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or
beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these
false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason
my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered
women's shelters in the '50s and '60s, but another was her false hope that
he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us
to real possibilities.

Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting
because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop
Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White
House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of
legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of
legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They
are already not okay, and they're getting worse.  Rapidly.

But it isn't only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It
is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our
light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that
makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our
protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can
we continue if we do not have hope?

We've all been taught that hope in some future condition - like hope in
some future heaven - is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I'm sure
you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and
was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew
plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she
clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the
story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it
remains to this day mankind's sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here
of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to
alleviate or eliminate one's misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved
to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves
the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that
hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line. Hope
is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely
Buddhist saying "Hope and fear chase each other's tails," not only because
hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right
now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what
hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You
wouldn't believe - or maybe you would - how many magazine editors have
asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers
with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last
spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the
audience, and here's the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing
for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are
essentially powerless.

I'm not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just
will. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish
writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that
the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result
means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they
hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that,
they've assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short
term, and they've stepped away from their own ability to participate in
stopping it.

I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make
sure the dominant culture doesn't drive them extinct. If coho want to
leave us because they don't like how they're being treated - and who could
blame them? - I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not
want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer
have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive.
We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do
whatever it takes.

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the
awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping
the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free - truly
free - to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope
dies, action begins.

PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, "If things are so bad, why don't you just kill
yourself?" The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex
enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are
really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really
good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness,
satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings.  We are
really fucked. Life is still really good.

Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow
themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must
then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel
many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely
appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also
fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are,
they may be forced to do something about it.

Another question people sometimes ask me is, "If things are so bad, why
don't you just party?" Well, the first answer is that I don't really like
to party. The second is that I'm already having a great deal of fun. I
love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We are
doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love.

I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse
for inaction. I've learned that if you deprive most of these people of
that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another.
The use of this excuse to justify inaction - the use of any excuse to
justify inaction - reveals nothing more nor less than an incapacity to
love.

At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q and A and
announced that the only reason people ever become activists is to feel
better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn't matter, he said, and
it's egotistical to think it does.

I told him I disagreed.

Doesn't activism make you feel good? he asked.

Of course, I said, but that's not why I do it. If I only want to feel
good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the
real world.

Why?

Because I'm in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby
lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling
through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of
course results matter to you, but they don't determine whether or not you
make the effort. You don't simply hope your beloved survives and thrives.
You do what it takes. If my love doesn't cause me to protect those I love,
it's not love.

A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you
realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up
on hope didn't kill you. It didn't even make you less effective. In fact
it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or
something else to solve your problems - you ceased hoping your problems
would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great
Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the
Earth itself - and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those
problems yourself.

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not
killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And
there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they - those in
power - cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through
threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you
can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can
still fight like hell - you can still live because you are still alive,
more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope
died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who
depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who
exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the
mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate
that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you
died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim
died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you.
Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who
thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The
you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel.
The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The
you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the
land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your
family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you
who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the
lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on
what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet,
killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to
your family, your friends, your landbase - not to your family as
self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase,
animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed
and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.

When you give up on hope - when you are dead in this way, and by so being
are really alive - you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the co-option
of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that
abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture
inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters
frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims
perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this co-option on
themselves?

But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is
broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising.

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the
people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to
those in power.

In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing.

Derrick Jensen is the author of A Language Older Than Words and The
Culture of Make Believe. His essay in this issue is excerpted from
Endgame, to be published in June by Seven Stories Press and used here with
permission.

Copyright 2006 The Orion Society. Reprint requests may be directed to the
Editors.


[We have had a (misplaced) hopes in Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, the
Democratic Party. Many will have (misplaced) hopes in Hillary Clinton in
2008, McX in 2012, McY in 2016, all in the hope/faith that no matter how
bad global warming and approaches to fascism get, we've always got more
time.

That there's never a time to "get our panties in a twist", and that those
who do are ridiculous idiots. That times will always be good, at least for
them. That they can stick with same old same old, laugh at the "purveyors
of gloom and doom", and do nothing. That all the old tactics that haven't
worked for decades, someday will. That it (fascism) can't happen here. Ha
ha, they will laugh, tra le tra la!

These same people will have hope/faith that the DFL will bring us
universal single payer health care, though it has been a major player for
years in privatization and expanding HMOs, and though its most
"progressive" candidate for governor could find no time for it in this
session. But we have faith - lightning may strike, a miracle may happen,
cows may fly, and the DFL may give us single payer.

If you haven't noticed, political progress stopped somewhere in the
mid-70s, and has been regressing ever since. What has the DP done, or even
fought for, equivalent to all the progress it was part of in the 30s -
60s? Where is the old idealism? The vision of a better life and better
world? Sunk under lesser-evilism; under not challenging the system; of
going along, in the hope/faith that the old progress must be automatic -
even tho in the past it came only through concerted action. They imagine a
no-sweat free ride. This is not how things work.

I, on the other hand, have hope and faith that I am immortal. So far, so
good.  -ed]


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   - David Shove             shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu
   rhymes with clove         Progressive Calendar
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